Rethinking Repair An Essay by Steven J. Jackson sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media. The modern infrastructural idealThe fulcrum of these two worldsA creature of bones, not wordsThe world is always breakingA side that goes unrecognized+8 More 104. Site RepairMakers and MakingMaintenance and Care repair
The city's most vital organs Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. They serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper workings of cities. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities The right overlap streets